MF01: Meme Theory of The Universe
When did the memeing of life begin? Was reality always this memefied? Or have we just entered a new meme-centric level in the simulation?
If you spend just about any time online, you’ll definitely have noticed it by now: everything is a meme. The market’s driven by memes (stonks, number go up, to the moon!), politics is a war of memes (A, B, C), and even art is just a high-grade meme machine (X, Y, Z).
There’s no escaping it - everywhere you click, with each new app and tab you open, there they are again: an endless stream of memes. From the banal, harmless kind all the way to the transgressive, revolutionary type. A meme for every possible niche interest, style or opinion you’ll ever have.
And those are only the ones you get to see, the surface web of memes publicly available for everyone to consume. As with anything online, of course, the rabbit hole goes much deeper - memes for days…
Memes are a fact of life on the internet today. They’re the digital equivalent of water. Part of our mundane, everyday digital realities to the point where they become almost invisible - so obvious you barely stop to notice.
Yet, exactly because “they’re hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time”, we have to constantly remind ourselves of their existence. If for no other reason than to understand the effects they have on our collective psyche.
So that’s what this post is about: an attempt to explore the origins and meaning of memes. And while it might be impossible to come up with a grand theory of memes in this piece, let’s run with it and see how far we get.
-/-
Let’s begin by defining terms. The dictionary definition gives us the meme as “a unit of cultural information spread by imitation”. Okay, that’s pretty good, but slightly unwieldy. Let’s try to keep it simple for now: a meme as an idea. One that’s designed and optimised for being imitated - a viral idea.
This can apply to just about anything. As the OG definition by Richard Dawkins had it, memes could span the whole range of culture: “tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches”. Their defining characteristic being not how they’re expressed, but rather how they’re distributed - by mimesis, or imitation.
Monkey see, monkey do.
The term, of course, was coined by Dawkins pre-internet (1976). “Meme” as a concept back then hadn’t yet gone mainstream and achieved its “dank” status across the interwebz. That was a different era, when memes were still primitive creatures, without a dedicated transmission vector to accelerate their growth.
For that to change, the internet had to happen...
(This image hadn’t yet been created, meme’d to death and revived this year as an NFT)
And with it, along came the memes - the origins of a new digital species, the first of its kind: a new language of the people, made possible by the “mass consensual hallucination'' enabled device you’re reading this on.
[Quick aside: the second best hot take I came across recently framed the internet as a “meme propagation layer”. Pure genius!]
Anyway, I digress...
At first, internet memes were produced for a very specific purpose: to pass the KonMari litmus test - to spark joy! The whole ethos, as enshrined in the 9GAG slogan, after all was “just for fun”. Optimised for cheap comedic effect, made “for the lulz” and upvotes - the more, the merrier.
For the most part, early memes came in this one-size fits all format: the image macro, those glorious jpegs with one-liners we all loved and shared in the early days of social media (#tbt).
As an image-object medium, it started off relatively simple and direct. Immediate reward delivered right at the moment of consumption. The model was always the same: “what you see is what you get”.
Except for when you didn’t!
Sometimes, it was just impossible to “get it”.
Sometimes, the memes just made no sense.
But as it turns out, that was always a feature, not a bug.
Memes never exist in a cultural vacuum. They’re intertextual beings, constantly referencing and communicating with each other and the culture around them. Context is key - without it, good luck (404).
Precisely because of this “inside joke” element, however, memes effectively double as a social signaling mechanism. Used to encode and share cryptic messages that only make sense if you’re cc’d in the eternal self-referential online loop of internet culture.
If you know, you know. Otherwise, sorry but you’ve failed the vibe check.
Memes, in this context, function like socio-cultural artifacts. Pieces of a larger puzzle, used to express who we are - identity, belonging, politics, the whole shebang.
Not just ephemeral media, but fragments in our construction of self - how we make sense of and relate to the world around us.
The meme, in this way, behaves like a mental selfie - snapshots of our inner selves used as branding material for our external selves.
At the extreme, even a new form of cultural sensemaking. One that constructs and shapes our shared perception of reality.
(Cue galaxy brain meme…)
This is how we went from a culture slightly amused with these “weird little internet jokes” to one overtaken by their omnipresence. Silly jokes all the while, but now with bonus IRL side-effects.
And so, that’s how I found myself waking up one morning and checking my newsfeed only to see a cascade of memes: the internet had finally reached it’s logical endpoint - memes all the way down.
Memes that keep us from ending it all; that we shall cherish forever; that distract us from the burning world around us; that cure anxiety and depression… “memes that” ad infinitum.
As these things usually go, I imagine it happened “slowly at first, then suddenly” all at once. By the time I noticed it, the transition had already happened. Memes were officially no longer just child’s play for internet culture - they were the new mainstream.
The meta had evolved. Form and function both mutated. The meme was now the medium, message and metaphor. All merged as one.
Today, the meme is, without any hyperbole, “the most potent form of content in the modern age”. It’s, after all, the hidden truth behind this tweet right here:
The man, the myth, the legend, the Technoking of Tesla himself - a.k.a. the DogeFather, the only lvl. 99 meme summoner on the blue marble server who can move markets with one tweet (Elon OP)!
Could a meme take over the galaxy? Take down an empire? Throw an election?
Is that moment already here? Is it the “new normal”?
What’s your theory?
-/-
P.S. - for the single best resource I’ve come across on memes, check out: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1DaKZTSMMhAJQUezZOh946TmniGBnESWC1HjVrrKYyao/edit#slide=id.gd6f618c3cc_0_3
P.S.S. - for the best are.na meme channels that didn’t make it in the article, see meme superchannel & meme studies.
If you have suggestions of others to add, lmk!
my friend anastasia and i made that meme deck! thank you so much for sharing